Annual meetings are a nightmare for Rupert Murdoch's minders. Back in the US he can handle any number of public outings without making a ripple, but in Australia he has a gift for unhappy headlines. He had just told shareholders what a bad idea the current push for tighter privacy laws were. Really, who needs them, when newspapers were so good at self policing? 'Privacy laws are for the protection of the people who are already privileged and not for the ordinary man or woman,' he told reporters at the press conference after the meeting. After the recent death of Prince Diana, he continued, 'I think you'll see a great deal more restraint by all the newspapers in Britain and I think you will see a stronger and better-policed code of ethics.' That restraint would mean paying less money for paparazzi photographs. 'Princess Diana, whom we all had great respect for, generally worked with photographers to her satisfaction . . . I think newspapers paid far too much for them and there'll be a major cost saving if we can bring this thing through.'
Up to then, no one had thought to turn Diana's death into a budget line item. Murdoch also offered a small rebuke to questions from the Sydney Morning Herald as 'part of the consistent and nagging denigration of News Corporation that goes on in your newspaper day after day, orchestrated by friends of another organisation . . . but I won't go any further than that'. That was the Australian public broadcaster, the ABC, that Murdoch was being arch about. It's important when you're kicking your rivals to keep a light touch.
Back then the NDS story was just beginning. But working out what happened next at NDS would prove a long, frustrating trail. The first part of that would be understanding the people and events that had led up to Oliver's close call in Toronto in 1997. The question that would recur for me time and again was: who dropped the ball? Who was overseeing the dramas that played out at NDS? And who at some point should have told the NDS black-hat operations that what they were doing was a really bad idea? NDS reported to the Office of the Chairman at News Corporation. NDS execs reported to Rupert Murdoch's closest people. Arthur Siskind and News Corp's chief financial officer David DeVoe sat on the NDS board, as did James and Lachlan Murdoch and Chase Carey, who was by then co-COO of News Corp. How much of all this, if any, made it into NDS's reports to its board, is not known.
At the time I knew nothing of the adventure in Toronto. In hindsight it's tempting to link it in the same time frame as the annual meeting in Adelaide and getting thrown out of the morning tea, as some sort of indication that senior management's attention was focused elsewhere and no one was minding the store. But that doesn't really work, because the annual meeting was in early October, a fortnight before Oliver's great escape. On October 24 1997 the record shows that Rupert Murdoch was in Beijing for a meeting in the Great Hall of the People with Ding Guangen, the head of the Chinese government's Propaganda Department.
Actually that was later in the day. Earlier in the morning, around the time that Alex was desperately working his way through Toronto's seedier hotels on the other side of the world, Murdoch had taken time off for a little sightseeing and to buy some ties in Xiushui Market, or Silk Street. He had dispensed for the morning with the services of local exec Bruce Dover. Instead he was accompanied by a vivacious young Chinese executive from Star TV, acting as his interpreter for the first time, called Wendi Deng.
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